Link Exchange

I received an unsolicited e-mail yesterday. It asked “can we exchanged (sic) links?” Then it provided the URL they wanted promoted. A hotmail return e-mail address was supplied. I checked the web site they wanted promoted. It had 451 inbound links to it. It also had a Google Page Rank 2. So I thought about this proposition and the value it would provide to me.

The first thing that was sketchy was that they were spamming me. They did not address me by name. They also did not give me their name. Also they only had a hotmail account. That does not mean they are evil. However they do not have e-mail, or will not give out their e-mail from their own domain. And the final straw was that their email was not grammatically correct. So perhaps English is not their first language. Still that made the request seem a bit shady.

Google does not like link exchanges in general I think. So I would not want to do anything that would penalize me in terms of page rank. The page they wanted to exchange was only a page rank 2. It also linked out to a lot of other sites. So they would not be able to provide much extra link juice for my site.

I guess I could respond with a test URL of my own. Then I could tell them to link to me first, and I would reciprocate. That way I could ensure this was not a one way deal. I could also analyze the effect on my test web page. Hey. It might be worth a try. However I suspect this would either have negligible or even negative effects in the end. You can’t fault somebody for trying to gain inbound links. To sign me up you need to perfect your pitch.

Link to Self

I read a blog post by Tim O’Reilly. This was on the O’Reilly radar blog. The title of the blog entry was “Is Linking to Yourself the Future of the Web?” Tim is finding more and more that big sites are not lining out to other sites. If they need to reference other sites, their main articles will link to another page of theirs which lists other sites. This phenomenon is catching on quickly. Tim worries that this may spell doom for the web. The whole point of the Internet is for good web sites to be linked to by others.

Now I can certainly understand why big sites do not want to link out to other sites. I run a bunch of very small sites. And I myself am very stingy is linking outside. When I do link, I frequently link to some of my other sites. Why give link juice to somebody else when I can pass it on to my own sites for benefit?

There are some small scenarios where I link out to another site. This happens when I find something truly excellent that deserves a link from me. And I have found that I get good karma when I do that. It might be that the owner of the site finds out and thanks me. Or even better I might get some links back from a site with better page rank than myself.

But the bottom line is that it costs me some juice when I link to somebody else. Why would I want to do that if my goal is to achieve a high page ranking? The only business reason might be that I provide good links that keep my readers coming back for more. I do not know whether that is enough of a reason. I figure I can write interesting enough stuff to gain peoples’ eyes.

Perhaps we came blame this problem on Google. They are the ones that set up the rules for page rank. If Google wanted me to freely link to other sites of worth, they would make it worth my while somehow. Google are you listening?

Web Page Scores

Previously I had blogged about how my premier web blog got rated poorly for SEO by the HubSpot tool. I thought I would review my scores from this tool for a couple other sites I have. Perhaps you can learn something about what I have done on these sites, and the affect it had on their SEO effectiveness.

A very low SEO score of 4 was awarded to one of my image galleries. There is just one page on the site. And it has only one heading. There are 85 images on the page which the tool considers bad. The tool found only 4 inbound links to the page. It has an Alexa rank somewhere around 26 million which is no good. This web site has been around a little while. However it has no Google page rank.

I have another blog where I discuss some dark topics. It received an SEO score of 27 which is still not that good. This blog has 16 headings. It has 15 images, which the tool also reports as being bad. This blog has 26 inbound links. That may be due to the fact that I submitted the blog to a bunch of directories. I am sad to say that this blog also has no Google page rank.

Another blog of mine was an experiment. I post fictional letters to a celebrity on this site. It received an SEO score of 28. It has 49 pages indexed by Google. It only has 12 inbound links. I did submit it to a few directories. It has an Alexa ranking of 9 million. I am happy to report that this site has a Google page rank of 1.

Finally I want to talk about a third blog of mine. This blog does not have a lot of entries. However each entry is about a technical topic. It has an SEO score of 34. There were 87 inbound links reported by the tool. This blog has 47 pages indexed by Google. It has an Alexa ranking of 20 million. But it also has a Technorati ranking of 1 to 2 million. This site also has a Google page rank of 1.

In summary, the HubSpot web score can provide some insight into your SEO effectiveness. Inbound links are a significant factor. I suspect site lifetime plays a good part as well. Submitting a URL to web directories may be one way to help out. Blogs can get a Google page rank without a huge web score from HubSpot. I wonder how much better they would fare if I follow the guidance from the HubSpot tool

Web Site Score

A while ago I read a post about a guy receiving an unsolicited proposal from an SEO Company. So the dude takes the company’s web site, runs it through a web marketing analysis tool, and finds the web site lacking in terms of SEO. This was quite amusing. It may have been an amateur SEO Company. Or maybe they just did not care how their web site ranked. I assume it was the former case. Regardless I thought that I myself should see how my web sites fared with this tool.

The tool is from the HubSpot site. It is an online tool where you feed it the URL of your site. The tool then analyzes your site in terms of SEO, and gives you a score from 1 to 100. The higher the score, the better your SEO techniques on the site. Now I will confess that I have ran many of my web sites through this tool. Most of my sites do not fare greatly. Then again, I have not diligently followed the best practices for SEO on them. I though I would review the results I got back from analyzing my premier site which is Software Maintenance.

The HubSpot tool was quick to point out a lot of SEO problems with my site. I had no meta description or keywords on my pages. I also was missing alt text for images (and I have a ton of images on the site). There were no keywords on the inner pages of the web site. The site was hosted on a free domain (Blogger). There were no links to my site from delicious or Digg. And there was no way to sign up for updates on the site. Ouch. It sounded like my site got spanked,.

The good news is that the tool did report some positive SEO things about my site. For instance the domain was registered for more than one year. Thanks Google. It also had an entry on DMOZ and Yahoo directory. Those were added manually by me. The tool stated that my site had a blog. Well in fact my site is a blog. The tool also detected that my site has an RSS feed.

The tool graded my site below 50%. Last time I was in school, 50% translated into failure. That might be wake up call to do a little SEO work on the site. However what matters are hard results. Some of the items listed may be subjective or have little to do with my site’s success. Here are the statistics that the tool determined for my site. It has an Alexa ranking of about 8 million, which puts it in the top 29%. Yeah that is not too good. The tools also found that my site had a Technorati ranking of around 900,00, which puts it in the top 1.39%. Nice. The worst news was that my site did not have a Google page rank yet. I am hoping this is due to the fact that the site is new. We shall see.

Proposal

I read a great question on the Joel On Software web site. This was in the Business of Software discussion board on the site. A guy tried to do search engine optimization by himself for a couple years with little or no success. So he shopped around for some professional help. Here are the details of a proposal from an SEO company:

$325 for keyword analysis
$1095 for web site optimization
$345 for link building / submission
Optional $349 monthly SEO campaign

The guy asked for some feedback on the proposal from the readers of the site. He stated that he already spent around $1200 a month on Google AdWords. The responses by the other readers of the site were so interesting that I wanted to mention them here.

A number of people advised against the submission part of the bid. This was not only worthless, but could cause some harm to the business. Other people commented that the work could be outsourced at a cheaper price to somebody else. However the quoted price did not seem that high so it might not be worth it.

There were some who believed the work outlined on the proposal would make no measurable difference on the success of the business. A couple people chimed in that the company should be careful that no black hat tricks would be involved with the work. Otherwise the work could actually cause some damage instead of helping.

The majority of the feedback revolved around the topic of inbound links. The key for success in this arena is that you want quality links pointing to you. So submitting your site to the wrong places again might work against you. However good links can turn a small investment into a large return.

Edit Search Results

A couple blog posts have alerted me to an experiment that Google is conducting called Edit Search Results. A randomly selected set of Google search users are seeing additional icons on their search result pages. One of the items moves a search result to the top of the page via animation. There is also another icon which deletes an item from the search result page. Finally a third icon allows the user to enter comments about the search result item. You can also suggest another link to be included in the search result.

This functionality sounds like the Digg voting system where you vote a link up or down in the top Digg rankings. Google says the experiment is supposed to last for a couple weeks. The real question in my mind is whether user editing will have any impact on other peoples search results. Currently the Edit Search Results experiment is supposed to only affect your future search results when you are signed in with your Google login.

Marissa Mayer, who is Google’s vice president of search, has stated in an interview that the Google algorithms determine the ranking in the search result pages. She clarified that this ranking will not get recomputed due to any input such as the Edit Search Results feature. However this feature is still in experimental mode. Perhaps things may change if Google decides to roll this feature out for everyone.

The big question will be whether these results could then be gamed by unscrupulous individuals running tricky programs. I will wait until I actually see the Edit Search Results icons. Then I think this will be a task for Black of Hat.

Beware of Gadgets

I recently read an inspiring and depressing story about a top SEO programmer. He had written a popular gadget that everybody seemed to download and put into their web pages. His gadget linked back to his dating site. He built up over 500,000 inbound links due to this gadget marketing.

He did this work for his company. When they found out how successful it had been, they had him change his gadget to link some pay day loans web sites. Apparently Google caught on to this, considered it spam, and his web sites took a huge hit as a result. This alone is a sad story.

Here comes the kicker. The dude appealed the Google decision. And as a result, he got a manual review from none other than Matt Cutts himself. Matt did a lot of research before making his decision. And apparently he found out that it appeared that the Gadget programmer had intentionally left a lot of critical and incriminating details out of his appeal. As a result, Matt stayed the Google decision. Now this Gadget programmer is owned. The million inbound links amount to nothing. I just hope the poor guy does not get fired.

Note to self - check out Gadget programming to get inbound links to my site. Note #2 to self - don't be spammy.